Quay Brothers. On Deciphering the Pharmacists Prescription

This MoMA gallery exhibition and accompanying film retrospective will be the first presentation of the Quay Brothers work in all their fields of creative activity. Stephen and Timothy Quay, identical twins, are internationally renowned moving image artists and designers. For over 30 years, they have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation in the tradition of Czech Surrealists Jan Švankmajer and Jiři Trnka, Russian animator Yuri Norstein, and Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk, and have practiced a design aesthetic influenced by Polish graphic artists such as Jan Lenica, Roman Cieślewicz, Franciszek Starowieyski, and Henryk Tomaszewski. Beginning with their student films in 1971, the Quay Brothers have produced over 45 moving image works, including two features, music videos, dance films, documentaries, and signature personal works, The Street of Crocodiles (1986), the Still Nächt series (1988–2008), Institute Benjamenta (1995), and In Absentia (2000). They have also designed sets and projections for opera, drama, and concert performances such as Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa (1991), Ionesco’s The Chairs (Tony nominated design, 1997), Richard Ayre’s The Cricket Recovers (2005), and their 2011 site-specific staging of Bartok’s Sonata for Violin with violinist Alina Ibragimova in the UK.

In addition to their better known films, this exhibition will include unseen moving image work and graphic design, drawings, typography, and notebooks for films. It will address an audience of enthusiasts and uninitiated in the tradition of the Department of Film’s Pixar (2005) and Tim Burton (2009) exhibitions, and the Museum’s William Kentridge: Five Themes (2010), presenting animation and live-action moving image with installation pieces, objects, and works on paper.

Quay Brothers 
(Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay)
"On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets"
Kurator: Ron Magliozzi